The cost of overhauling the Darlington nuclear station has risen by $300 million and the project is struggling to stay on schedule, but Ontario Power Generation says things are on time and on budget.

Nuclear technicians will train for the Darlington reactor overhaul at the Darlington Nuclear Information Centre, which houses a full size mock-up of Darlington's CANDU reactor. A new assessment of the overhaul project has identified $300 million in cost increases two years before work is scheduled to start.

Their report says the cost escalation is largely due to the poor quality of estimates made at earlier stages of the project:

“The increased budgets are simply reflective of the true project costs, had they been estimated properly at the outset.”

The report also says staffers are scrambling to complete detailed engineering by next May, so they can produce a “high quality project cost.”

“Engineering is currently challenged to meet this milestone,” it says, adding that the problems “continue to present schedule threats.”

OPG spokesman Neal Kelly downplayed the risks.

“We’re confident the overall refurbishment project will come in on time and on budget,” he said.

Planners have broken the overhaul into 19 sub-projects, only two of which are behind scheduled and over budget, he said. A third is on schedule, but over budget.

Kelly said the project is expected to cost at most $10 billion, in 2013 dollars. That figure will grow with inflation, since it won’t be finished until 2026

OPG has said in previous filings that the final cost of the project, “translates into a completion cost (of) $12.9 billion, including capitalized interest and contingency, by the end of the project.”

The biggest part of the project, making up nearly 60 per cent of the cost, involves rebuilding the cores of the four reactors at Darlington.

But the recent cost escalation comes largely in supporting areas of the station, known collectively as the “campus plan projects.”

Collectively, those costs have jumped to $824 million from $552 million, according to the report.

The document, filed with the Ontario Energy Board, is riddled with blacked-out sections.

Some of the blackouts are head-scratchers, since the deleted information is available elsewhere in the report.

For example, one sentence reads: “In all, OPG believes that the cost variances from the campus plan projects will be approximately (blacked out) which equates to approximately 2.5 to 3 per cent of the refurbishment project’s total $10 billion working budget.”

Three per cent of $10 billion is $300 million.

Nuclear overhauls have had a troubled history.

A decade ago, OPG figured it would cost $1.3 billion to return four mothballed reactors at the Pickering station to service. In the end, the price tag was $2.6 billion for two reactors.

More recently, Bruce Power spent $4.8 billion to return two laid-up reactors to service, after an initial estimate of $2.75 billion.

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